7

East and West

The Eastern Empire

Justinian

The emperors at Constantinople continued to call themselves emperors of Rome, and only gradually did the name Byzantine attach itself to their state. Justinian I (ca. 482-565) was the greatest of these emperors. Although of Balkan peasant origins, he was an educated man with an exalted sense of the authority of his office and the ability to extend his empire and to win back lost territories even in the West. Justinian set out to make Constantinople the most magnificent city in the world, especially in the rebuilding of the great church of Hagia Sophia, but the success of his reign was marred by a plague pandemic so severe that the authorities were scarcely able to dispose of all the corpses and from which he himself almost perished.

The Persian Threat

As the West increasingly fell under the control of the barbarians, the Eastern Empire remained relatively, albeit precariously, strong, mainly because of its sophisticated administrative structure and its vast wealth. The Persians conquered much of the Near East early in the seventh century, devastating the Christians of Jerusalem, moving on to conquer Egypt, and besieging Constantinople itself. But Emperor Heraclius (610-641) drove them off and in turn invaded Persia, recovering what was believed to be the true Cross and personally carrying it on his shoulders back to Jerusalem.

Court Intrigues

However powerful, emperors sometimes fell victim to plots. Phocas (602-610) seized the throne from Maurice (582-602) and had Maurice and his five sons killed, only to be killed himself eight years later. Constantine VI (780-797) was blinded and left to die at the instigation of his mother, Irene, who was herself subsequently forced into a convent.

State over Church

Justinian saw the Church as a branch of the state, and the relationship between the two was a complex one. Beginning in the mid-fifth century, the emperors were crowned by the patriarch, but it was the emperors who were responsible for preserving the integrity of the faith and who often regulated church life by their decrees. They had the authority to summon councils, as Constantine had done at Nicaea, but doctrinal issues had to be decided by the assembled bishops.

Emperors bluntly rejected any claim that they were subject to episcopal authority and in practice controlled much of the episcopacy. Although bishops nominated other bishops, including the patriarch, the emperor was not required to accept their nominees, which led to occasional flagrant abuses, as when the emperor Romanus I (920-944) named his sixteen-year-old son, Theophylact, patriarch. Like emperors, patriarchs and bishops were deposed with some frequency amidst the tangle of civil and religious factions.

Monasticism

Religious orders never developed in the East as they did in the West. Each monastery was essentially independent, although great houses exerted strong spiritual influence over lesser ones. The hermetical, cenobitic, and communal modes of life all flourished. Although monastic life was found all over the East, from the tenth century onward, the peninsula of Mount Athos, in a remote part of Greece, was considered the spiritual powerhouse of the Empire, as monks from a variety of places went there to establish monasteries of such rigor that not even female animals were allowed on the peninsula.

The monasteries were to some extent resistant to imperial authority, with the monks upholding what was considered the full purity of orthodox faith and therefore willing to confront even the emperor, although they were not immune from imperial censure. Some emperors resented the monasteries for attracting lavish donations that could have been used for other purposes.

Emperors and Popes

Although Justinian’s Code recognized the primacy of the see of Rome, the popes were for a time treated as imperial administrators. The popes continued to be elected at Rome, but the emperors ratified their election, and during the sixth and seventh centuries, most of the popes were Greeks who had either been attracted to Rome as the capital of the Church or had come as refugees from imperial conflicts. As with everything else, the issue of ecclesiastical authority was closely intertwined with secular politics. The Empire continued to claim territory in Sicily and southern Italy, where there was a significant Eastern presence, including monasteries of Eastern monks.

Appeals to Rome

In every Eastern quarrel, such as disputed elections of bishops, an appeal was likely to be made to the pope, whose primacy of honor was universally acknowledged. During the fifth century, popes twice rebuked emperors for supporting heresy and reminded them of the necessity of being in communion with the see of the Apostles at Rome.

However, the same Council of Chalcedon that condemned Monophysitism definitively and hailed Leo the Great’s “Tome” (see Chapter Four above, pp. 86 and 98) also issued an ambiguous decree that seemed to make the see of Constantinople equal to Rome, although the pope’s name continued to come first among bishops for whom prayers were offered in the liturgy. It remained ambiguous whether the East acknowledged Rome as having actual ruling authority, and there was growing estrangement—for example, Hadrian I (772-795) was the first pope to omit reference to the reigning emperor in his own proclamations.

“The Second Rome”

The spiritual authority of Constantinople was precarious, in that, unlike Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome, it was not an apostolic see but had been founded late and owed its prestige entirely to its being the capital of the Empire. It was claimed, however, that the church at Byzantium had been founded by the Apostle St. Andrew, Peter’s brother; that Rome also derived its status primarily from having been the imperial capital; and that Constantinople was the New Rome.

Patriarchates

Some Easterners proposed that the see of Antioch should have primacy, since Peter had presided there before going to Rome. Alexandria traced its lineage to St. Mark the Evangelist. In the ninth century, when the city was under Muslim control, Venetian adventurers took the Apostle’s body to Venice, where the magnificent Byzantine-style St. Mark’s Basilica was built to house it. (Based on this, the archbishops of Venice have ever since been called patriarchs.)

Complex Relations

Theodoric, the Arian Ostrogothic king of Italy (475-526), sent Pope St. John I (523-526) to Constantinople to ask the emperor Justin I to tolerate the Arians, but upon John’s return Theodoric threw him into prison, where he died. Theodoric’s successor Theodahad sent Pope Agapetus I (535-536) to Constantinople to plead (he was unsuccessful) against an imperial invasion of Italy. Both popes were treated with the greatest honors in the imperial capital, and Agapetus, who died there, was bold enough to depose a patriarch of Constantinople whom he deemed heretical and to consecrate a successor.

But both popes also found themselves in a delicate position midway between the emperor who sought to reconquer Italy and the heretical Italian king who also threatened the independence of the papacy. Beginning in 556, the popes no longer sought confirmation of their elections from the emperors, and when the emperor Justinian II (685-695) attempted to impose various Eastern disciplinary practices on the West, Pope St. Sergius I (687-701) rejected his authority.

The Photian Schism

In 858, Emperor Michael III the Drunkard (842-867) deposed Patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople (d. 877) and appointed the layman Photius (d. 897) in his place, an act that Pope Nicholas I denounced after Ignatius appealed to him. Photius soon claimed authority in southern Italy, and Nicholas excommunicated him, whereupon Photius accused the Western church of heresy, because of the doctrine of Purgatory and the word filioque in the Creed. Then a Byzantine council declared Nicholas deposed. However, after an imperial coup, the newemperor, Basil I the Macedonian (867-886), sent Photius to a monastery and restored Ignatius. (Nevertheless Photius would be restored and removed yet one more time before his death.) The Fourth Council of Constantinople (869-870) affirmed the authority of the see of Rome, although the Council was later repudiated in the East.

The extent of papal authority remained uncertain in the East. In 903, Emperor Leo VI, having been widowed three times, married a fourth wife, for which he was excommunicated by the Eastern bishops. He then obtained a dispensation from Rome, which the Eastern clergy refused to recognize.

The Orthodoxy of the Roman See

Part of Rome’s prestige was its boast, which the East acknowledged, that it had never countenanced heresy and that in the great early debates it had been the ultimate arbiter of orthodoxy, as Leo the Great had been during the Nestorian dispute. But Rome’s orthodoxy was in some ways passive, in that there was a good deal less theological activity in the West. Easterners might condescend to Westerners as theologically backward, but Westerners could point out that the East was the hatching ground of almost all heresies. (When an emperor patronizingly told a Western visitor that Westerners manifested a naïve, childlike faith, the visitor admitted the claim but replied that the faith of the East was like an old worn-out garment.)

Monophysitism

Monophysitism survived in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Syria, especially among hyper-ascetic monks who in their zeal actually killed the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch at various times. Monophysitism was closely linked with the doctrine of “deification”, whereby, through grace, men can become progressively more like God, an idea largely unknown in the West, which would probably have resisted it because of the danger of Pelagianism. Though the church in Egypt and Ethiopia quite early made a translation of the Bible into the Coptic language, over time it went into schism.

Theodora

Monophysitism was closely intertwined with the twists and turns of court politics, enjoying some imperial support. Justinian accepted the decrees of Chalcedon, but his wife, the famous Empress Theodora (d. 548), continued to support the Monophysites. The daughter of a lowly animal trainer and, according to some accounts, at one time a prostitute, Theodora was a woman of extraordinary ability. Pope St. Agapetus I (535-536) went to Constantinople to counteract Theodora’s influence and to plead with Justinian not to invade Italy, but he died while in Constantinople.

Justinian’s armies retook Rome shortly thereafter, and Theodora was then able to secure the election of the anti-pope Vigilius, in rivalry to the newly elected St. Silverius (536-538), whom the imperial agent in Italy deposed and sent into exile, where he died of starvation. The church at Rome then accepted Vigilius as the rightful pope, but when he too resisted Theodora’s agenda, he was taken by force to Constantinople, where he eventually signed an ambiguous formulary that was condemned in the West. After Theodora’s death, the Second Council of Constantinople (553) definitively reaffirmed the decrees of Chalcedon.

The Life of the Eastern Church

Odium Theologicum

Theological disputes in the East extended even to the level of the common people and not infrequently erupted in violence, fueled by obscure and illogical links that existed between theological opinions and loyalty to particular teams of professional charioteers. Early in his reign, Justinian was almost driven from Constantinople in the Nike (“win”) riots, which may have been partly caused by Theodora’s support of the Monophysites. He reportedly had thirty thousand people put to death as punishment.

Monothelitism

Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople (d. 638) at one point proposed that Christ had only one will, a theory (Monothelitism) that sought to preserve His unity but that seemed to its critics to overlook such things as His prayer in the garden to be spared the cup of suffering. Monothelitism was accepted by Pope Honorius I (625-638), but Pope Theodore I (642-649) deposed the Monothelite patriarch Paul of Constantinople, a judgment that was confirmed by Pope St. Martin I (649-655).

As a result, Martin was brought to Constantinople, where he was brutally treated and sent into exile, dying in Russia. But the Third Council of Constantinople (680), by affirming that Christ had both a human and a divine will—that He experienced all human emotions except sinful ones—vindicated Martin and implicitly condemned Honorius, a condemnation made explicit by Pope St. Agatho (678-681). Honorius’ apparent espousal of Monothelitism was the sole blot on Rome’s record of orthodoxy, and Pope St. Leo II (682-683) explained that Honorius had been merely negligent, not actively heretical.

Maximus the Confessor

St. Maximus the Confessor (d. 662), the last of the great Greek Fathers, had been secretary to Emperor Heraclius (610-641). He became a monk and was savagely mutilated for his opposition to the Monothelitism of Emperor Constans II Pogonatus (641-668). Maximus was also instrumental in the final condemnation of Monophysitism, proposing that the mystical union of two natures in Christ affirmed the goodness of creation and the inherent dignity of human nature. Maximus was the most prestigious of the various Easterners who acknowledged the primacy of Rome.

Liturgy

The Eastern church had three distinct liturgies, attributed to St. James the Less, St. Basil, and St. John Chrysostom, respectively, their differences from the West including the use of languages other than Greek, leavened bread, unwatered wine, and the epiklesisof the Holy Spirit to descend upon the Communion elements in order to make Christ present. The Eucharist was not celebrated daily in the East. At a time when the administration of confirmation was gradually being separated from that of baptism in the West, confirmation in the East was administered by chrismating (“anointing”) the newly baptized baby, and the infant was then given Communion.

Even more than in the West, the experience of worship in the East was intended to offer a foretaste of Heaven. The liturgy included long chants without instrumental accompaniment and was celebrated amidst almost unimaginable solemnity and splendor. The walls of Eastern churches were covered with mosaics or paintings of biblical scenes or of saints, hence the liturgy was celebrated in the presence of the saints. The iconostasis—a gated wall adorned with holy images—separated the altar from the body of the church, so that worshippers had only occasional glimpses of the sacred eucharistic act.

The Dome

The use of the dome was distinctive to the East, although it had also been used at Rome itself. It perhaps derived from the Platonic idea of the circle as the perfect form, since it has no beginning and no end, hence symbolizes eternity. Whereas in the West the eye was carried upward until vision was no longer possible in the great heights of the building, in Byzantine churches the worshippers saw Heaven in the mosaics of the dome, looking up to the image of the Pantocrator.

Icons

Icons (“images”) were gradually introduced as a way of making Heaven concretely imaginable, through the images of its inhabitants. But unlike the West, the East for the most part forbade the use of three-dimensional images, as constituting idols, the cross alone excepted. (There were some bas-relief sculptures, especially on the exterior of churches.) Two-dimensional pictures were permitted, and even exalted, not as mere representations of Christ and the saints but as a means by which holy persons were actually made present.

Iconoclasm

But the greatest crisis in the history of the Eastern church was precisely over such images. Beginning in 730, Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-741) condemned their use, possibly as a way of moving closer to the Jews and the Muslims. The Church became bitterly divided over the issue. Pope St. Gregory II (715-731) upheld the use of icons, and Leo sent a fleet to arrest him, which was, however, wrecked en route.

The iconoclasts (“image-breakers”) insisted that icons of Jesus separated His divine and human natures, since the divine nature was incapable of visualization, and that the veneration of icons thus amounted almost to polytheism as well as to idolatry. The true image of the saint was the replication of his virtues in the life of the believer. The iconoclasts insisted that the cross was the only legitimate image. Although in general they still venerated the relics of the saints, they were suspected of not believing in saintly intercession, and Constantine V Copronymus (741-775) in 766 confirmed those fears by forbidding prayers to the saints.

Iconophilia

In the minds of many, the condemnation of images amounted to a kind of Gnosticism and the attendant denial of the Incarnation itself and of the sacraments, both of which presuppose the belief that God could come to man through material means. There was much popular resistance to iconoclasm, with the monks in particular opposing the emperor on the issue.

The iconophiles (“image-lovers”) or iconodules (“image-worshippers”) characterized the iconoclasts as Judaizers still attached to the Old Law and defended an ancient practice that had deep theological meaning. It was thought possible to ascend the ladder of being to God through a series of steps, of which visible images were one stage—Paul’s characterization of earthly knowledge of the divine as “through a glass darkly” or the Platonic idea of images as “archetypes” of transcendental realities.

John of Damascus

St. John of Damascus (or Damascene, d. 749), the most important theologian of the age, was an iconophile who pointed out that the Jews in fact had images, notably the Ark of the Covenant, and that icons represented the history of Christ in the same way as the Gospels did. He formulated what became the standard teaching concerning the veneration of saints even in the West, distinguishing among different Greek terms: latreia (“worship”) for God alone, hyper-duleia (“high honor”) for Mary, and duleia (“honor”) for the saints.

The Icons Restored

Empress Irene (780-803) restored the icons in 787, when the Second Council of Nicaea reversed Emperor Leo III’s ruling. But the controversy was by no means over, as the influence of the two parties seesawed back and forth. The issue remained alive until Empress Theodora II at last restored the icons permanently in 843.

As it did with all its important decisions, the church at Constantinople sent the Pope at Rome formal notification of its restoration of the icons, and Hadrian I (772-795) approved the action. Later, both the iconoclast emperor Leo V (813-820) and some leading iconophile monks appealed to Pope Paschal I (817-824), who sided with the latter. Emperor Leo V once again mandated iconoclasm; after he was murdered at the instigation of his successor, the brutal Michael II (820-829), Paschal intervened again, although on both occasions his emissaries were maltreated by the emperors.

Holy Men

Connected to the veneration of icons was the cult of wandering holy men, who were believed to have great spiritual power and who often attracted large popular followings. Both emperors and bishops looked on them with mistrust, as embodying a charismatic authority at odds with hierarchy, and in the eighth and ninth centuries there was an organized campaign against them, during which some were put to death.

The Survival of Dualism

The suspicion that iconoclasm was at heart Gnostic was given plausibility by the survival of various forms of heretical dualism in the Empire, called by a variety of names, such as Bogomils and Paulicians. These movements forced Christian apologists once more to affirm the goodness of all creation.

Theological Creativity

The East remained theologically creative even beyond the patristic age, but among the important differences between East and West was the fact that the East did not develop a rigorous abstract theology like Scholasticism.

Pseudo-Dionysius

Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. 500) was perhaps Syrian. His principal works were Mystical Theology, On the Divine Names, and On the Celestial Hierarchy, which reflected Neo-Platonic philosophy in their account of the soul’s ascent to God by stages, culminating in a final leap in the dark, thereby making negative theology an integral part of Eastern thought. Maximus the Confessor expounded a distinctive Eastern theology of deification—God became man so that man can become God, ascending through the series of stages described by Pseudo-Dionysius. Man has free will that is prone to sin but is transformed by divine grace.

The Nature of Sin

Augustine of Hippo had brought Western theology to a level equal to that of the East; but just as Augustine knew no Greek, the East was losing knowledge of Latin; hence Maximus and other Eastern theologians were apparently unaware of Augustine’s work. Augustine held that Original Sin was transmitted from parent to child through the very act of conception, whereas for Maximus, mankind shared in Adam’s sin only in the sense of having a propensity for evil, not as something basic to human nature.

Marian Devotion

Marian devotion was especially strong in the East because Mary was the human being who had advanced farthest along the road toward deification. By the eighth century, she was being referred to as “Mediatrix of All Graces”, because salvation had come through her Son and therefore through her. In the West, the strong Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin strengthened the belief that Mary was conceived without sin (“Immaculate Conception”), because otherwise she would have transmitted that inherited sin to her Son, a belief that seemed to be confirmed by the angel’s greeting, “Hail, full of grace” (Lk 1:28).¹ Probably because the doctrine of Original Sin was given less prominence in the East, there was much less belief in the Immaculate Conception there.

Simeon the New Theologian

The most important Eastern theologian of the Middle Ages was St. Simeon the New Theologian, who lived late in the eleventh century. While the adjective new was usually a negative term in Eastern theology, Simeon received it as an encomium—he was a true theologian and therefore had to be distinguished from “The Theologian”, Gregory Nazianzen. Simeon’s approach was mystical, based primarily on the liturgy and the experience of monastic life, the lived faith as distinct from abstract speculation.

Prayers for the Dead

The Western belief in Purgatory was based on the fact that many people died without having completed the penances assigned to them and in the hope that a merciful God would allow them to discharge their obligation after death. But the Eastern church did not necessarily impose such penances in confession and prayed for the dead without explaining precisely why. Thus to the East, the doctrine of Purgatory looked suspiciously like the heresy of Origen—that the damned will eventually be released from Hell.

Adiaphora

Everyone acknowledged that there were adiaphora—things that were indifferent in terms of doctrinal orthodoxy but were nonetheless points of difference between East and West—leavened or unleavened bread, the style of tonsures, a drop of water in the wine of the Eucharist. These were not easily resolved, because they were customs so deeply imbedded in the entire way of life on both sides.

The West required unleavened bread on the grounds that it was the bread used by Jesus in the Passover Last Supper, while the East insisted that leavened bread was necessary in order for the Eucharist to be real food. The West’s inclusion of a drop of water in the chalice was meant to symbolize a degree of human participation in the act of redemption.

Clerical Marriage

Somewhat paradoxically, although the East was on the whole considered more rigorous and “otherworldly” than the West, as the West moved toward universal clerical celibacy, the Eastern church still allowed clerical marriage, although bishops were drawn exclusively from the ranks of the celibate.

Filioque

The disagreement over the filioque clause—that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son—was the most substantive. The word had first been inserted into the Creed under Charlemagne, perhaps in order to guard against subordinating the Son to the Father, but Pope Leo III, while affirming the truth of the doctrine, declined to make it universal. No one denied it, and some Easterners affirmed it; but overall the East viewed it as an improper innovation.

Missionary Efforts

Beginning with Justinian’s uncle and predecessor Justin I (518-527), the church at Constantinople sent missionaries to the parts of the Near East that remained pagan—Ethiopia and Arabia, the Black Sea region, and southeastern Europe. (In the second century, Armenia actually had a Christian king, Tredatus II, about whom little is known.) Christians existed in the Persian Empire during the fourth century and were persecuted by adherents of the dominant religion, Zoroastrianism. Nestorianism survived there and in Syria, India, and even remote parts of China, which was missionized from Persia.

The conversion of a whole people meant, among other things, that a particular society that had lain outside the boundaries of Christendom had now been incorporated into that spiritual whole, into civilization itself.

The Bulgars of southeastern Europe were converted in 864, the Bohemians of central Europe in 929, the Poles in 966, and the Kievan Russians in 988. As in the West, conversions in eastern and central Europe were often accomplished through a king or prince—St. Wenceslaus of Bohemia (922-929), St. Vladimir of Kiev (972-1015), Boris of the Bulgarians (852-889), St. Stephen of Hungary (997-1038).

Cyril and Methodius

The saintly brothers Constantine (d. 869) and Methodius (d. 885) in a sense founded Eastern European Christianity. They were men of importance in Constantinople and friends of Photius, but Methodius became a monk while his brother remained an imperial official.

Although Rome and Constantinople were not as yet in schism from one another, there was rivalry in Eastern Europe over patriarchal oversight and the liturgy. Because they spoke the Slavic language, the brothers were sent to the kingdom of Greater Moravia, which encompassed much of central Europe and part of Poland and was a cultural battleground between Germanic and Byzantine influences.

The brothers developed a written Slavic language and composed a vernacular liturgy in that language, whose liturgical use came to be called Old Church Slavonic. In 867, the brothers visited Rome, where Pope Hadrian II (867-872) approved their vernacular liturgy. Constantine then entered a monastery, taking the name Cyril. He died soon afterward and was later commemorated in the Slavic alphabet that came to be called Cyrillic.

Methodius returned to Greater Moravia as its bishop, but for a time he was imprisoned by rival German bishops. After Methodius died, Pope Stephen VI (896-897) forbade the Slavonic liturgy, and Germanic influence obliterated much of Methodius’ work, which survived only farther to the East. The Magyar invasion of 906-907 destroyed much of Moravian Christianity.

The Kievan Rus

Vladimir of Kiev sent emissaries to the leading centers of Christianity, including Rome, but affiliated his principality with the patriarchate of Constantinople because of his ambassadors’ description of the heavenly liturgy as celebrated there. Boris of Bulgaria similarly vacillated between Rome and Constantinople, finally choosing the latter. Russian and Bulgarian churches were then built in the Byzantine style, even as Poland’s orientation toward Rome was manifest in its Romanesque and Gothic churches.

The Great Schism

Michael Cerularius (Kerullarios, d. 1059), a patriarch of Constantinople, showed such independence that he clashed even with the emperor. He opposed Western religious practices—the filioque, priestly celibacy, unleavened bread in Communion—so aggressively that he closed the Latin churches in his see city.

Partly in response, Pope Leo IX in 1054 sent a delegation to Constantinople under Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida (Humbert de Moyenmoutier, d. 1061). The delegates received a friendly welcome from Emperor Constantine IX (1042-1055), but Cerularius’ intransigence was matched by Humbert, who pronounced an excommunication on the patriarch and placed the decree on the altar of Hagia Sophia. Although this incident has traditionally been treated as marking the final split between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, it was not seen as such at the time. Among other things, the force of Humbert’s decree was doubtful, because Leo IX died during the episode.

Islam

While the Eastern Empire, like the West, still faced barbarian attacks, Islam was now by far its gravest danger. For the next more than two centuries, relations between East and West were dominated by the Crusades, which the East both welcomed, insofar as they reopened the Holy Land and pushed back the Muslims, and resisted, insofar as they involved the intrusion of the Western powers into a steadily shrinking Empire.

Muhammad

Islam (“submission”) began in the Arabian peninsula with a wealthy merchant, Muhammad (d. 632), who was probably familiar with pockets of Jews who lived there. Muhammad claimed to be a prophet who had received from the angel Gabriel the revelation that there is only one God—Allah—and that all should completely submit to Allah by following Muhammad. The new faith dated itself from Muhammad’s hijirah (“flight”) in 622, when, in the face of fierce opposition, he left his native city of Mecca for Medina, from which he then mounted a triumphant military return to Mecca.

Qur’an

The new religion did not develop a complex theology, in the way Christianity did. Its sacred text—the Qur’an—is a collection of the sayings of Muhammad, who claimed his statements were revealed by God through the angel Gabriel. The Qur’an was compiled after Muhammad’s death and deals primarily with matters of 'margin-top:12.0pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom: 0cm;margin-left:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal'>Conquest

No religion in history came to dominate so much territory in so brief a time. In the period from 638 to 643, three of the four Eastern patriarchates—Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria—fell to those whom the Byzantines called “Arabian wolves”. Persia was conquered in 652, and all of North Africa by 707. But Muslim conquest was restrained somewhat by a bitter and permanent split that occurred shortly after Muhammad’s death, between Shiites, who held that the movement had to be led by a blood relative of the Prophet, and Sunnites, who elected their own caliphs.

Schism

As Islam splintered, its principal capitals became Baghdad in Mesopotamia, Damascus in Syria, and Cordoba in Spain. The crescent became its symbol, and, coincidentally, the Islamic empires roughly came to describe a crescent on the map, stretching from Mesopotamia in the East, across North Africa, and curving northward to the Pyrenees.

A Rising Threat

Its conquests were principally at the expense of the Byzantine Empire. The Muslims reached Constantinople itself in the years 674 to 678 and again in 717 to 718 and were repulsed only with difficulty. There were occasional imperial victories, as when Monophysite Armenia was freed from Muslim rule in the 920s, and the victors found what was believed to be a burial cloth of Jesus.

Radical Monotheism

Islam was a religion of radical monotheism, implacably hostile to anything that appeared to compromise that truth. While Christians were in disagreement for centuries over the use of force in spreading their faith, Muhammad had no such doubts, so that the new faith used the sword wherever it encountered resistance.

“People of the Book”

But partial tolerance was allowed for “the people of the Book”—the Bible—because both Old and New Testaments were viewed by Muslims as divinely inspired and some biblical figures, from Abraham to Jesus, were considered great prophets. The error of Christianity, according to Muhammad, was its divinizing of Jesus, a heresy that he claimed to be empowered to correct. Like some Jews, Muslims regarded Christians as polytheists, because of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Muslim policy varied from time to time and place to place. The restricted theoretical toleration of Christians and Jews was often violated, and Christians subjected to harassment or persecution. But Christians also sometimes served as bureaucrats or soldiers of Muslim rulers—e.g., John Damascene was an official of the caliphate of Damascus.

Converts

In imperial territories conquered by Islam, such as Syria, equal tolerance was extended to both orthodox Christians and Monophysites and other heretics. Few Muslims seem to have converted to Christianity under the Empire, but a good number of Christians made the reverse journey. Because as heretics they did not enjoy the patronage of the Byzantine emperor, many Nestorians and Monophysites in particular became Muslims.

Enslavement

Christians who were captured either in battle or by Muslim-raiding parties that got as far north as England were often enslaved, and the religious order of the Mercedarians (“buyers”) was founded especially to ransom them. Bl. Serapion (d. 1240) was a soldier in the Spanish wars who became a member of the order, went to Algiers to free captives, and was crucified for preaching Christianity. (Slavery of non-Christians existed to a limited degree in Europe, but the number of Muslim slaves was infinitesimal in comparison with the number of Christian slaves in Muslim lands.)

The Holy Land

Muslims controlled the Holy Land beginning in the seventh century, and Christians were allowed to visit the Holy Places but not to build shrines, although in 1009 a sultan who was possibly insane had the church of the Holy Sepulchre destroyed. An attempt was made in 1033 to organize a major pilgrimage to the Holy Land, since Christ had not returned a thousand years after His death, but would-be pilgrims soon found that the obstacles to such a project were formidable indeed.

Mutual Understanding

The emperors sometimes sponsored formal disputations between Christian and Muslim or Jewish scholars, primarily with the aim of converting the non-Christians but also having the effect of familiarizing Christians with Muslim and Jewish doctrines. In the West, Peter the Venerable arranged to have the Qur’an translated into Latin, so as to be able to refute it, and Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles was in part aimed at converting Muslims.

The Crusades

The First Crusade

The timing of the First Crusade (1095) was fortuitous, in that the Muslims themselves were divided at the time. The leading Western European monarchs all happened to be excommunicated in 1095, and Urban II appointed a French bishop as the Crusade’s official leader, while military leadership devolved on high-ranking members of the nobility. As many as 150,000 Christians answered the call, but the difficulties were enormous, and only about forty thousand finally arrived. Several crusading armies traveled by different routes and met at Constantinople, where they took oaths of fealty to the emperor, whose armies also participated in the war.

“The Franks”

The Byzantines viewed “the Franks” with misgivings or worse, the chronicler Anna Comnena (d. ca. 1148), daughter of the Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118), seeing them as repulsive barbarians. The Crusaders often ignored their oaths to the emperor, and over the next two centuries, the emperors were not above negotiating secretly with the Muslims against the Crusaders.

Nobility and Brutality

The contradictions inherent in the crusade phenomenon were manifest from the beginning, as fierce warriors, enlisted in a noble cause, nonetheless sometimes terrorized other Christians before even catching sight of a Muslim and sometimes massacred Muslim towns that fell into their hands. (A Cistercian abbot, Gilbert of Nogent [d. ca. 1112], wrote a history of the First Crusade that was quite candid in its recounting of Crusader misbehavior.) The Muslims were equally brutal and had been so long before the Crusaders arrived.

The Latin Kingdoms

The First Crusade made steady progress. Jerusalem fell in 1099, and a kingdom was set up under French noblemen: first Godfrey of Bouillon (d. 1100), then his brother Baldwin (d. 1118). (Godfrey, but not Baldwin, rejected the title of king, because Jesus alone ruled in the Holy Land.) Muslims were at first treated tolerantly. The Western rulers attempted as far as possible to replicate the institutions they knew at home, particularly the feudal system, building Western-style castles to maintain security. As always with feudalism, there was constant intrigue and rivalry among the ruling houses and the military orders, not infrequently including minor wars.

The Church

There was a great influx of Westerners into the Near East, and a number of Latin churches were established; but Eastern Christians retained their own liturgies. The patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch were brought under papal authority and Western bishops appointed—usually by the king of Jerusalem, confirmed by the pope—to replace the Eastern prelates. Pope Paschal II (1099-1118) demanded that the Eastern churches recognize the Roman primacy, but a formal East-West dialogue two decades later failed to resolve the issue.

Knights Templar

In 1118, the Knights Templar were founded at Jerusalem on the site of Solomon’s original Temple as a community of lay warriors. They eventually came to observe a monastic rule written for them by Bernard of Clairvaux, which included life in community, vows, and the Divine Office. (The Templars may have possessed the Shroud of Turin, an ancient cloth that bears the image of a crucified man and is believed by many people to be the burial cloth of Jesus. The Shroud was probably taken from Constantinople in 1204 and was held by the Templars for the next century, first placed on public display in France in 1357.)

Knights of St. John

The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (Knights Hospitalers) were founded around the same time as the Templars, to care for the sick and wounded. They operated a two thousand—bed hospital in Jerusalem, but they also evolved into a military order, known first as the Knights of Rhodes and later as the Knights of Malta. The Knights of Malta still exist as a fraternal order that cares for the sick, but the group long ago gave up its military character.

Both orders of knights built castles throughout the Christian territories and were the Christians’ principal lines of defense. Unpredictably, they also became involved in banking, setting up a system by which money could be deposited with Knights in Europe and drawn out in the Holy Land, a system that facilitated pilgrimage and also made the Knights themselves wealthy.

“Prester John”

In 1122, Western Christians were given another motive for undertaking expeditions to the East, when a mysterious individual appeared in Rome claiming to be a powerful Christian king of a great unknown kingdom in the East. Later in the century, Pope Alexander III received a letter purportedly from the same ruler, and the quest for the illusory Prester (“Priest”) John became an occasional minor obsession for the next four centuries.

The Second Crusade

The Christian states in the Near East struggled to survive during the first half of the twelfth century, and in 1145, the Second Crusade was preached by Bernard. Louis VII (1131-1180) of France became the first Western monarch to take the cross, followed by German Emperor Conrad III (1138-1152). The Crusade gained little, and Christians in the Near East remained divided by suspicions and conflicting ambitions. The cities of the Holy Land fell to the Muslims one by one, often accompanied by the slaughter of their inhabitants, and in 1187, the great Muslim ruler Saladin (d. 1193) retook Jerusalem, allowing the Christians limited toleration.

The Third Crusade

The Third Crusade followed, the largest military effort of the entire Middle Ages, financed by a “Saladin tithe” to be collected throughout Christendom. It seemed to fulfill the original papal dream of a united Christendom, although the Byzantine emperor Isaac II Angelus (1185-1195) did not welcome the Crusaders and secretly negotiated with the Muslims.

Frederick Barbarossa, Philip II Augustus of France (1180-1223), and Henry II of England agreed to lead the attack. But Henry died before he could set out and was replaced by his son Richard I the Lion-Hearted (1189-1199). Barbarossa died in the Holy Land in a freak accident, falling from his horse in full armor and drowning in a shallow stream. The two remaining leaders, Philip and Richard, quarreled, and the campaign that began with great expectations unraveled.² The Crusade failed to retake Jerusalem but did save other Christian holdings.

The Fourth Crusade

Notoriously, the Fourth Crusade (1204) was subverted by intrigues among the Crusaders themselves, mainly the Normans, who were the first warriors to arrive and who placed one of their own on the imperial throne; the Venetians, who provided transportation to the Near East; and the Byzantines. The Crusaders were first diverted to conquer a city in the Balkans that had rebelled against Venetian dominance, then the exiled Byzantine emperor Alexius IV Angelus (1203-1204) asked for their help.

The Crusaders took Constantinople, which was then perhaps the largest and richest city in the world, and—partly perhaps in retaliation for a massacre of Latin Christians some years before—brutally sacked it, desecrating churches and contemptuously placing a prostitute on the throne of the patriarch in Hagia Sophia.

Pope Innocent III, for whom the retaking of Jerusalem was the highest priority, at first condemned this perversion of the Crusade but then allowed it to stand, thereby creating an enduring grievance of the Eastern church against the West. A Latin bishop was named patriarch, whereupon most Eastern bishops left their sees and went into exile. The Crusaders deposed two Greek claimants for the imperial throne and installed a Western dynasty that lasted until 1261.

Shared Churches

Until well into the fourteenth century, Venice kept control of the islands of Crete and Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean, where they allowed the Eastern Christians to retain their own observances. In some cases, Easterners and Westerners shared the same churches, each celebrating their own liturgy.

The Fifth Crusade

The Fifth Crusade was proclaimed by Innocent III in 1213, but it did not begin for four years and like its predecessors had little effect. The Crusaders had concluded that it was strategically necessary to conquer Egypt in order to reconquer the Holy Land, but they failed in that goal. The most notable aspect of the Fifth Crusade was the presence of Francis of Assisi, who met with Sultan al-Kamil (1218-1238) and boldly attempted to convert him to Christianity. (The sultan seemed impressed by the humble friar but showed no interest in converting.)

Frederick II

Emperor Frederick II was among those taking the cross, but he was excommunicated after several delays in setting out for the Holy Land. He then married the daughter of King John I of Jerusalem (1210-1237) and on that basis claimed the kingdom for himself. In 1229, he obtained Jerusalem through negotiations with a weakened al-Kamil, but most Christians regarded this as a betrayal, because they held the city only at the sultan’s pleasure, and Frederick promised that there was to be no crusade for at least ten years. Frederick soon returned to Germany, and in 1244, Jerusalem fell to the Muslims for the final time.

The Sixth Crusade Later Efforts

Louis IX mounted the Sixth Crusade in 1248, again pursuing the Egyptian strategy. He had some success, but at one point he was captured and had to be ransomed. In 1270, he invaded Tunis in North Africa, as a gateway to Egypt, but soon died of fever.

Later Efforts

Periodically thereafter, various Christian princes arrived in the Holy Land, with no lasting result. The last Christian outposts—Acre, Beirut, Haifa, and the biblical cities of Tyre and Sidon—fell in 1291, their survivors ruthlessly persecuted. There were occasional forays by European princes after that, and the Seventh Crusade (1365) attacked Egypt and sacked Alexandria before retreating.

Although the idea remained alive for another two centuries, in practice the crusade tradition came to an end when Pope Pius II (1458-1464) rallied support that melted away when he died suddenly.

Limited Pilgrimages

Franciscans made some converts from Islam during the ascendancy of the Latin Kingdoms in the Near East, and after the fall of those Christian outposts, they enjoyed a precarious tolerance in the Holy Land. They were permitted to care for the Christian shrines and to receive occasional pilgrims, a task they still perform. (Franciscan missionaries sent to North Africa were killed.)

Efforts at Reunion

Mughals Catholic Conversions

The Mughals (Mongols) were yet another wave of barbarians to invade Europe. They established an empire that stretched from China into eastern Europe. A Mughal army got as far west as the Adriatic Sea in 1265 but turned back voluntarily. It appeared for a time that Mughals and Christians in the Near East might ally against Islam.

Catholic Conversions

Because of Norman incursions in Byzantine Sicily, Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus (1259-1282) sought Western allies, and in 1274, an Eastern delegation attended the Second Council of Lyons, when both Emperor Palaeologus and Patriarch John Veccos (d. 1282) submitted to papal authority. But Pope Martin IV (1281-1285) antagonized Michael by supporting the claims of a French candidate to the imperial throne, and after Michael’s death, Veccos was deposed and sent to a monastery.

In the face of the increasing threat of the Ottoman Empire (modern Turkey), Emperor John V Palaeologus (1341-1376, also 1379-1391) came to Rome in 1369 and actually became Catholic.

Councils of Florence and Ferrara

Relations between East and West became intertwined with the conciliar movement in the West (see Chapter Eight below, p. 216). A Greek delegation, desperate to solicit Western help against the Turks, attended the conciliarist Council of Basle in 1431. But when Pope Eugene IV (1431-1447) summoned his own council at Ferrara in 1439, a delegation of seven hundred, including Emperor John VIII Palaeologus (1425-1448), attended. Eugene announced a crusade, but with little effect.

At neither Ferrara nor Florence was there was much opportunity for a sophisticated exchange between East and West over the perennial issues that separated them. Florence eventually proclaimed that only those in communion with the Roman Church could be saved. On paper, it was a great success, as a number of Eastern prelates, perhaps hopeful of another crusade, subscribed to its decrees, but in practice it achieved little.

Reunion Proclaimed

While the urgent hope for a crusade to turn back the Turks was the principal driving force behind Byzantine ecumenism, there was some genuine desire for reunion, and in 1452, reunion was actually proclaimed in Hagia Sophia. Despite bitter criticism of his actions, Emperor John VIII remained a Catholic, as did his son and successor Constantine XI (1449-1453), the last Byzantine emperor. The final rupture between Catholicism and Orthodoxy occurred in 1472, when the Orthodox formally repudiated the formulae agreed to by John VIII. Cyril Kontaris, patriarch of Constantinople (d. 1640), entered into communion with Rome but was deposed and murdered by the Turks.

The Fall of Constantinople

The final fall of the Empire to the Turks in 1453 brought an end to most Latin influence in the Near East, to the point where one Eastern bishop was reported to have said, with reference to the respective headdresses of Muslims and Catholic bishops, “Better a turban than a miter.” But the fall of Constantinople by no means brought an end to the Christian-Islamic conflict. St. John of Capistrano (d. 1456), a Franciscan who had been the general of the order and a papal diplomat, personally led a successful crusade against the Turks in Serbia.

The Ottoman Threat

At least for the popes of the sixteenth century, the crusading ideal was still not dead. Leo X (1513-1521) pressed hard to get the European monarchs to respond to the alarming expansion of the power of the Ottomans, but over the next century, as successive popes tried vainly to mount new crusades, the Ottomans advanced further into eastern Europe. They were opposed by an occasional Balkan prince and by the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519-1555). But for a time the Ottomans were in alliance with the Catholic king Francis I of France (1515-1547), an alliance dictated by the intense rivalry between France and the Holy Roman Empire.

Lepanto

During the 1520s, the Ottomans subdued Serbia, the isle of Rhodes, and Hungary. They advanced to the gates of Vienna and subsequently terrorized the coasts of Italy and Spain, enslaving innumerable Christians whom they took captive. But the Knights of Malta, on their tiny Mediterranean island, withstood the Turkish advance, and in 1571, the Spanish commander Don John of Austria (d. 1578), illegitimate son of Charles V and half-brother of Philip II of Spain (1555-1598), won a great naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece, thereby liberating fifteen thousand Christian galley slaves and freeing the Western Mediterranean from the Muslim threat. Pope St. Pius V urged Catholics everywhere to pray the rosary for the cause of victory, and the Turkish ships were devastated by high winds. (Afterwards, Pius V established the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on October 6, the date of the battle.)

The Battle of Vienna

In the later seventeenth century, the Catholic Louis XIV of France (1643-1715) encouraged the Turks to attack his archrival, Catholic Austria. But although they reached the gates of Vienna in 1683, they were turned back by an army under John III Sobieski, king of Poland (1674-1696). From that date, the Ottoman Empire began a long decline. Hungary gained its freedom a few years later.

The Uniates

After the Catholic-Orthodox split of the Middle Ages, the Holy See showed an increasing willingness to make accommodations with those Eastern Christians (sometimes called Uniates) who were in communion with Rome. The history is a complex one, but overall the official policy followed by the Holy See was enunciated by Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758), who declared unequivocally that the Easterners had a right to retain their own customs. Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) was particularly solicitous of the welfare of the Eastern churches.

Over the centuries, several Eastern-Rite seminaries were established in Rome. The Congregation for the Oriental Church was set up in 1917, and the Eastern churches have their own Code of Canon Law. Jesuits, who operate the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, have a particular interest in the Eastern churches.

Liturgy

The liturgy—in both the Rites themselves and the languages in which they are celebrated—primarily defines these various churches. Although in modern times there have been many accommodations to Western practice, in general most Eastern Rites follow ancient Eastern customs: married priests, but not bishops; leavened bread in the Eucharist (which is not ordinarily referred to by the Latin word Mass); Communion in both kinds; an ikonostasis separating the sanctuary from the body of the church; baptism by immersion, immediately followed by chrismation; the Blessed Sacrament reserved mainly for the sick, not for veneration; standing during most of the Eucharist; and icons rather than statues as objects of devotion.

Monasticism

Monasticism is integral to the Eastern churches, their monks often called Basilians (distinct from the Latin-Rite order of the same name) because they follow the monastic rule of St. Basil the Great. Following the oldest pattern of monastic life, only a few monks in each monastery are ordained to the priesthood, since the monastic vocation is considered distinct.

Celibacy

The Uniates follow the Eastern custom of allowing priests to marry prior to ordination but choosing only celibates—often monks—as bishops. (At the behest of the Latin-Rite bishops, Eastern-Rite clergy in the United States are not allowed to be married, although the rule has not always been enforced.)

Patriarchs

Each of the Eastern churches is headed by a prelate, some of whom bear the ancient title of “patriarch”, who appoints bishops who in turn elect the patriarch, both subject to the confirmation of the Holy See. Since the nineteenth century, some patriarchs have been made cardinals, but others have declined the honor because they regard the cardinalate as an office of the Latin Rite. (Until 2000, one of the official papal titles was “patriarch of the West”.)

Eastern Rites

The history of most of the Eastern Rites is extremely complex, mainly because of changing political and ethnic conditions that strongly influence religious loyalties. The Easterners have often been victims of persecution, and immigration has dispersed them far beyond their original homelands. Virtually all have a presence in the United States and Canada.

Byzantine

The Byzantine Rite, which is the largest, uses Old Church Slavonic, the language originally introduced into the liturgy by Cyril and Methodius. The oldest continuous Byzantine-Rite communities are in Italy, where some of the monasteries of the South continued to use the Greek language after Rome adopted Latin and remained in communion with Rome after the schism of 1054, their number strengthened by refugees from Constantinople after 1453.

For a period in early modern times, these Byzantines were under Latin-Rite bishops, but their hierarchy was eventually restored, and it was their integrity that Benedict XIV sought to protect. Italian Byzantine communities still survive in small numbers, an unbroken chain from the earliest centuries, and there are a relatively small number of Greek Catholics scattered around the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as Byzantine Catholic outposts in Albania, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland.

Ruthenian

The Ruthenians, who are closely related to the Russians ethnically, are a branch of the Byzantine Rite found mainly in the Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, and Hungary. Many call themselves Ukrainians, the name Ruthenian being primarily an ecclesiastical title.

In a sense, the Ruthenian Rite began when the metropolitan (archbishop) Isidore of Kiev (d. 1463) aroused the wrath of the czar by accepting the decrees of the Council of Florence and was forced to flee to Rome, where he was made a cardinal. As a result of his actions, there were some Russian converts. The Ruthenians under Polish rule continued in communion with Rome for a while, after which many fell away, but a formal reunion occurred in 1595, as a result of intense proselytization by Jesuits, who had a special mission to convert the Orthodox.

Andrew Bobola

Bitter strife between Orthodox and Uniates continued for another century after the reunion of 1595. St. Andrew Bobola (d. 1657) was a Polish Jesuit of noble birth who worked in Lithuania to convert the Orthodox. He was flayed alive by Cossack warriors, but there were some Russian converts after Catholic Poland came under Russian rule. In the eighteenth century, many of the leading Polish Ruthenians joined the Latin Rite, primarily for nationalistic reasons, as Poland was partitioned among Catholic Austria, Protestant Prussia, and Orthodox Russia.

The Russian government severely harassed the Ruthenians, culminating in their forced reunion with Orthodoxy. Some resisted in secret, and a number eventually returned to Rome when Russia officially granted religious freedom in 1905. The Ruthenian Rite was tolerated by the Austrians, but Russia conquered some of this Austrian territory during World War I and once again tried to return the Ruthe-nians to Orthodoxy.

Andreas Szeptycki

When Poland once again achieved independence after the war, there were sometimes violent clashes between Latin-Rite Catholics and Ruthenians, and the heroic St. Andreas Szeptycki, metropolitan of Lvov, was put under house arrest by the Polish government. But over the next generation, due mainly to his leadership, the Ruthenian church recovered. Later he was deported to Russia, where he died in 1944, at a time when he and his flock were being persecuted by both the Germans and the Soviets.

Josyf Slipyj

Szeptycki’s successor, Josyf Slipyj (d. 1984), was also imprisoned by the Soviets for many years, and after World War II, the Soviet government again decreed the reunion of the Ruthenians with Orthodoxy, although few Ruthenians submitted. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, Catholic life began to revive, much of it stimulated by foreign clergy.

Other Rites

In predominantly Orthodox Transylvania (part of today’s Rumania), a Byzantine Rite was recognized by the Holy See in 1697, after Jesuits had reconciled some of the Orthodox to the Catholic Church. A Bulgarian Uniate church was recognized in 1861, but its first bishop was, for political reasons, kidnapped and imprisoned by the Russians, and most of the laity returned to Orthodoxy

The Near East

Anomalously, until 1922, the French government, no matter how anticlerical, was the official protector of Near Eastern Catholics and occasionally intervened militarily for that purpose, a responsibility undertaken because it helped protect French political interests in the region.

Melkites

The Melkites of Egypt and Syria derive their name from the Syrian word for “king”, since after the Council of Chalcedon they remained loyal to the emperor, in contrast to the Monophysites. The Melkites came to be completely under the authority of Constantinople, in time adopted the Byzantine liturgy, and were part of the schism of 1054. But some became Catholics during the Crusades, and the reigning patriarchs of Antioch accepted the decrees of union promulgated by the Second Council of Lyons and the Council of Florence. The later history of the Melkite Rite was closely bound up with the rise and decline of Islam, and in the early seventeenth century a mission of Jesuits and Capuchins brought about a reconciliation with Rome. Melkites are numerous in Syria and Palestine but have suffered greatly during the various Near Eastern wars of recent times. They are under the patriarch of Antioch, who lives at Beirut (Lebanon), and use the ancient Antiochian liturgy in Syriac and Arabic.

Maronites

The Maronites derive their name from a Syrian monastery that strongly opposed the Monophysites after Chalcedon. However, in the seventh century, under imperial pressure, the Maronites accepted Monophysite doctrines. Under Muslim persecution, they later fled to Lebanon, where there was considerable strife with the Melkites. The Maronites were reconciled with Rome as a result of the Third Crusade. The reunion endured, although the later history of the Maronites was a complex and troubled one, including brutal persecution at the hands of both the Turks and other Lebanese. (Six thousand Maronites were slaughtered by Lebanese Muslims in 1860, until French intervention brought the persecution to an end.) Like the Melkites, the Maronites are headed by a prelate called the patriarch of Antioch. Their liturgy is in Syriac and Arabic, with a number of Western modifications that were added over the centuries.

Armenia

The church in Armenia also embraced Monophysitism in the early centuries, although there was a fragile reunion with Rome during the Crusades and a nominal acceptance of the decrees of Florence. Later missionary activity, especially by the Dominicans, had some success. Catholics as well as Orthodox were victims of the anti-Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks during World War I, and afterward, the persecution continued as parts of Armenia fell under the control of the Soviet Union. The Armenian patriarch also resides at Beirut. The church uses a modified version of the liturgy of St. Basil in the Armenian language.

Chaldeans

The church in Persia and Mesopotamia (modern Iran and Iraq) supported Nestorianism after its condemnation at Ephesus, and for the next thousand years, the Nestorian church was the greatest missionary force in the world, establishing Christian outposts as far away as China, until this great spiritual empire was essentially destroyed by the Mughals in the fourteenth century. In the sixteenth century, a split in the Nestorian church led some to be reconciled with Rome, and their later history is a tangled story of schisms, reconciliations, and yet further schisms.

The Iran-Iraq Catholics are called Chaldeans, after the ancient homeland of the patriarch Abraham, and use the Syriac language. Their patriarch resides at Baghdad. The existence of the Chaldean church was always precarious, because of the Muslims, and it too suffered greatly under the Turks during World War I. Following the American invasion of 2003, the majority of the 1.4 million Christian Iraqis were reported to have fled in the face of bitter civil war and a revived militant Islam.

Copts

The majority of Egyptian Christians also refused to accept the decrees of Chalcedon and became the separate Coptic (“Egyptian”) church that retained Monophysite beliefs. Coptic legates accepted the decrees of Florence, but they had no effect. A small number of converts were made during the nineteenth century. The Coptic liturgy derives from the ancient liturgy of Alexandria, which was an adaptation of the Byzantine. It is celebrated either in Coptic or Arabic.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia, despite occasional missionary efforts over the centuries, remained firmly Monophysite. Formal reconciliation with Rome, for complex political reasons, was announced early in the seventeenth century, but attempts to impose the Latin Rite led to a reaction in which priests were martyred and all Catholics were expelled from the country. Later attempts at conversions led to still more martyrdoms, although some small progress was achieved. The few Ethiopian Catholics also follow the Coptic liturgy.

St. Thomas Christians

During the Middle Ages, the Holy See periodically sent legates to Christians in India, who traced their spiritual ancestry to St. Thomas the Apostle and who recognized the authority of a pope about whom they knew very little. At some point in the early Middle Ages, they seem also to have been evangelized by Nestorian missionaries from Babylon and, without necessarily becoming Nestorians, adopted the Chaldean liturgy.

When the Portuguese began arriving in India around 1500, the St. Thomas Christians recognized them as fellow Catholics. Temporarily without a bishop, apparently because of Muslim persecution, the Indian Christians were placed by the Holy See under the Chaldean patriarch of Baghdad. But the Portuguese in India were suspicious of the St. Thomas Christians, whom they considered Nestorians, and after the Portuguese clergy attempted to force a latinized liturgy on the native church, many of the St. Thomas Christians went into schism in 1653. Many subsequently returned to communion with Rome, but they were governed mainly by European bishops until the twentieth century, when the Syro-Malabar hierarchy was restored. In 1930, the remaining Indian schismatics reconciled with Rome as the Syro-Malankara Rite, which uses the ancient Antiochian liturgy.

Syro-Malabar Rite

The Syro-Malabar Rite is the largest Eastern church after the Ukrainians, and three of the ten largest orders of women in the Church—the Franciscan Clarist Congregation, the Congregation of the Mother of God of Carmel, and the Sisters of the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament—are part of that Rite. It uses the Chaldean liturgy, including the Syriac language.